Travel vlogger George Benson on what makes a good laptop

Want to follow your passion for travel? YouTube sensation George Benson tells us what he needs from a laptop…

George Benson dreamt of making YouTube videos from his teenage bedroom. Now he’s a bona-fide YouTube star with over 12 million views and a full-time career. His videos document his travels around the world – from the streets of Seattle to the beaches of Brazil. His life as a full-time travel vlogger means he’s always on the go. So he needs a laptop that’s powerful, fast and really portable.

“When I am abroad or travelling or at the airport – whatever it may be – I always need to be doing something with my laptop,” says George.

His laptop of choice is the HP Spectre 13 – a high-end, ultra-thin Windows 10 laptop that’s new for 2016. Here he picks out some of his favourite features:

Portable design

“When you’re travelling with laptops, cameras and other tech your bag can get heavy”, says George. “When it comes to taking this on the train or a plane the HP Spectre 13 is the guy you want to use,” he adds.

Why? “It’s not going to weigh your bag down – which is massively important… the Spectre 13 weighs around a kilogram, which is pretty nuts when you think about how light a kilogram actually is.”

Solid stage storage and processing power

For George performance is as important as portability. “For me as a YouTuber – someone who is always on the go, who needs things to work and has to stick to a tight schedule – this is super, super important,” he explains.

The fast-paced nature of YouTube video editing requires something responsive, and that won’t “keep you behind with pointless loading times”. The HP Spectre 13 uses solid state drive storage, better known as SSD – a faster, lighter, smaller alternative to a traditional hard drive. “With solid state storage,” says George, “it’s a faster hard drive. You’re not going to have many loading issues, and it’s not going to slow down your workload.”

Creative video-editing software demands lots of power too – so a laptop’s processor and RAM (internal memory) are also important. The HP Spectre 13 has a super-powerful Intel Core i7 processor and 8GB RAM to handle demanding tasks like rendering video.

George’s final word on the Spectre 13

George calls the HP Spectre 13 “one of my personal favourites”, adding that the laptop comes “thoroughly recommended” by him.

Other tech George uses

George works on both Mac and Windows. When it comes to storage that can mean messing around with USB sticks between the different set-ups. But the WD MyCloud NAS drive works with both Mac and Windows so he has a place to “keep all of my files together so I can access them on all my devices”. This helps make things “as easy as possible and accessible as possible” to make George’s workload as “simple as it can be”.